Search

Update: Montgomery County Officials have waived the fine and have told the children that they can re-open the lemonade stand in a location other than the main strip.

Some enterprising youth looking to raise money for charity by selling homemade lemonade near the U.S. Open had their stand shut down by the county holding the tournament. Montgomery county is also fining the parents of the children $500 since the kids didn’t have a vendor’s license.

To top it all off, the kids were donating half of the income from the stand to help fight pediatric cancer.

A county inspector had reportedly warned the children multiple times that what they were doing was illegal, but the kids continued to sell lemonade on Permission Tree Road in Bethesda, Maryland.

Carrrie Marriott, the mother of at least one of the children manning the stand, told WUSA9 of Washington D.C. that she has issues with the county’s decision to impose a fine. “I don’t agree, I think the country is wrong.”

What makes this story even more bizarre is that scores of fully grown adults are making a ton of money selling parking spaces along the very same road that this lemonade stand used to be on. The men selling parking spaces had to pay $300 a piece to the county to let people park on their front lawns, but since they are charging up to $60 per car, they are more than breaking even. The amount of money kids can make selling lemonade, no matter how good it is, can’t possibly reach five digits.

The director of permitting for Montgomery County, Jennifer Hughes, conceded that county inspectors typically do not crack down on children operating lemonade stands, but she also pointed out the stand in question was very large and close to a busy road.

Even if they county inspectors were right to do this for safety reasons, the idea that a town would shut down a charitable kids’ lemonade stand and then fine them for it seems, at the very least, cold. Marriott feels that what happened to her children was that they were taught a lesson: “there is no American dream.”